The heart is the center of a person's circulatory system. The left portions of the heart draw oxygenated blood from the lungs and pump it to the organs of the body to provide the organs with their metabolic needs for oxygen. The right portions of the heart draw deoxygenated blood from the body organs and pump it to the lungs where the blood gets oxygenated. Contractions of the myocardium provide these pumping functions. In a normal heart, the sinoatrial node, the heart's natural pacemaker, generates electrical impulses that propagate through an electrical conduction system to various regions of the heart to excite the myocardial tissues of these regions. Coordinated delays in the propagations of the electrical impulses in a normal electrical conduction system cause the various portions of the heart to contract in synchrony, which efficiently pumps the blood. Blocked or abnormal electrical conduction or deteriorated myocardial tissue causes dysynchronous contraction of the heart, resulting in poor hemodynamic performance, including a diminished blood supply to the heart and the rest of the body. Heart failure occurs when the heart fails to pump enough blood to meet the body's metabolic needs.
Tachyarrhythmias are abnormal heart rhythms characterized by a rapid heart rate. Examples of tachyarrhythmias include supraventricular tachycardias (SVT's) such as atrial tachycardia (AT), and atrial fibrillation (AF), and the more dangerous ventricular tachyarrhythmias which include ventricular tachycardia (VT) and ventricular fibrillation (VF). Abnormal ventricular rhythms occur when re-entry of a depolarizing wavefront in areas of the ventricular myocardium with different conduction characteristics becomes self-sustaining or when an excitatory focus in the ventricle usurps control of the heart rate from the sinoatrial node. The result is rapid and ineffective contraction of the ventricles out of electromechanical synchrony with the atria. Most abnormal ventricular rhythms exhibit an abnormal QRS complex in an electrocardiogram because the depolarization spreads from the excitatory focus or point of re-entry directly into the myocardium rather than through the normal ventricular conduction system. Ventricular tachycardia is typically characterized by distorted QRS complexes that occur at a rapid rate, while ventricular fibrillation is diagnosed when the ventricle depolarizes in a chaotic fashion with no identifiable QRS complexes. Both ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation are hemodynamically compromising, and both can be life-threatening. Ventricular fibrillation, however, causes circulatory arrest within seconds and is the most common cause of sudden cardiac death.
Cardioversion, an electrical shock delivered to the heart synchronously with the QRS complex, and defibrillation, an electrical shock delivered without synchronization to the QRS complex, can be used to terminate most tachyarrhythmias. The electric shock terminates the tachyarrhythmia by simultaneously depolarizing the myocardium and rendering it refractory. A class of cardiac rhythm management (CRM) devices known as an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) provides this kind of therapy by delivering a shock pulse to the heart when the device detects tachyarrhythmias. Another type of electrical therapy for tachycardia is anti-tachycardia pacing (ATP). In ventricular ATP, the ventricles are competitively paced with one or more pacing pulses in an effort to interrupt the reentrant circuit causing the tachycardia. Modern ICDs typically have ATP capability, and deliver ATP therapy or a shock pulse when a tachyarrhythmia is detected.
Cardioversion/defibrillation consumes a relatively large amount of stored power from the battery and can cause patient discomfort. It is desirable, therefore, to terminate a tachyarrhythmia whenever possible without using shock therapy. Devices have therefore been programmed to use ATP to treat lower rate tachycardias and to use cardioversion/defibrillation shocks to terminate fibrillation and certain high rate tachycardias.